Böcker av Jason Hung

Similar to neighbouring Southeast Asian countries, Indonesia is, simultaneously, infamous for its prevailing sex tourism economy, sex industry and sex trafficking activities. On 6 December 2022, Indonesia's parliament passed the criminal code to criminalize extramarital sex. The anti-extramarital sex legalization was established to help reinforce Indonesia's, following Islamic Law, stance of disallowing sexual behaviours beyond marital relationships. Those who engage in extramarital sex, per the criminal code, are sentenced to up to a year in prison.This book responds to Indonesia's latest legislation that passed the criminal code of criminalizing any act of extramarital sex. The formation of the arguments made in this book is based on the premise that, by criminalizing extramarital sex, the Indonesian government aims to, in part, crack down on the local prostitution industry to minimize any act of, child or not, sexual exploitation, prostitution and sex trafficking. The book presents how cracking down on the local or regional (i.e., Southeast Asian) prostitution industry cannot be accomplished by simply taking legislative actions.The book examines and analyses how sex work is socio-economically and institutionally constructed. This book presents the underlying unequal power of relations in Indonesian society that facilitates sexual exploitation, especially against disadvantaged children and women. The highlights of this book are the policymaking discourse on how local Indonesian policymakers should respond to such an unequal power of relations and the prevalence of sex work. The book, moreover, visits the anti-extramarital sex legislation in order to explain how the Indonesian government should endeavour to crack down on its domestic sex industry in order to uphold the values of human rights and lower the prevalence of the practice of commercial sex.

This book problematises the socioeconomic and institutional construction of prostitution in Thai contexts, identifying the root causes that propel underprivileged, discriminated and deprived women and girls to enter the sex industry. The author considers Thailand¿s tolerance of prostitution and sex trafficking, despite criminalising prostitution since 1960. In doing so, they explain how criminalising prostitution does not lower the odds of women and girls engaging in commercial sex, but rather, legally marginalises them from receiving the necessary social and healthcare support. The book highlights that neither can Thailand pragmatically practice a zero-tolerance stance against prostitution - primarily due to severe police corruption and its heavy reliance on the sex tourism economy to support the national economic growth - nor is Thailand willing to fully crack down on the domestic sex industry. Engaging in an evaluation of how legalising and decriminalising prostitution, along with continuing to implement policies and interventions that alleviate the root causes of prostitution, can help Thailand build a more inclusive society and less-prostitution-reliant economy in the long term, the book provides a nuanced understanding of the relationships between society, inequality, governance, criminality, and policy in Southeast Asian contexts. It is relevant to students and researchers in sociology, socio-criminology, public policy, government and Southeast Asian studies.

This book studies Indonesian and Philippine English-language printed media outlets to examine how regional public opinions of China and China-made vaccines progressed amid the coronavirus pandemic. By quantifying the presence of certain words, themes, and concepts within the qualitative, textual data of news articles from the most prominent English newspapers in Indonesia (i.e. The Jakarta Post) and the Philippines (i.e. The Philippine Daily Inquirer), the book investigates the trajectories of the regional narratives on Chinese vaccines, Beijing, and China. Through this same methodology, the book also explores indications of the degree of soft power exerted by Beijing through such media outlets in both Indonesia and the Philippines. Analysing how Sino-Southeast Asian relations changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, this book will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of international relations, media studies, and Asian politics.

Analysing the causes and effects of a variety of youth delinquent behaviours, both digital and conventional, this book aligns insightful sociological inquiry with an ongoing regional phenomenon.